


As Many Good Things As You Can Steal in Twelve Stolen Sweeps

by HestiasHearth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Culling (Homestuck), Discussions of infanticide (in the context of Alternian culling); genocide; and imperialism, Distant Past Zine, F/M, Gen, Graphic Depiction of Violence to Animals, Harm to Animals, Medical Abuse, Medical Experimentation, Non-Sexual Slavery, Slavery, we talk about legislacerators and a violent legal system
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2020-12-31 19:56:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21151334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HestiasHearth/pseuds/HestiasHearth
Summary: The planet that rejected you never taught you to be sufficiently afraid of it.It takes people to illuminate its darker corners, the insides of its fences, places you have never lived and never will, emotions you know exist only by conjecture. It takes people to teach you how to love them all over again.This work is a part of the Distant Past Fanzine. Download the fantastic full zine, filled with both art and writing over which I am still a mess of emotional things, athttps://distantpastzine.itch.io/distant-past-zine





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A massive thank-you to my incredible sensitivity reader, Tulip (Tumblr + Twitter: [g4m3grrrl](https://twitter.com/g4m3grrrl)).
> 
> Another to all of the amazing, patient, and supportive mods of the Distant Past fanzine (to [mod Goblin](https://twitter.com/glassgoblin), I owe a life debt), aaaand another to Kitkat (AO3: [elliptical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical) / Tumblr: [bipolarronanlynchevangelist](https://bipolarronanlynchevangelist.tumblr.com)) and Rafi (AO3: [muchlessvermillion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/muchlessvermillion/pseuds/muchlessvermillion) / Tumblr: [faewaren](https://faewaren.tumblr.com)), for partial beta-reading and extreme moral support. I’d call ya my Di and Psii, but I think sometimes we wind up taking turns.

i. _All we did, all we ever did was fucking try._

You hop off the great marble rectangle lining the stairs nimbly as you can, with a hand to its smooth surface to help you down, and then you just start walking, because in these sorts of highly controversial, spontaneously-seized venues (the steps of a library, today) you don’t tend to stick around.

A troll still jogs up in front of you partway down the block, and they’re one you recognize from the small crowd you’d gathered, and so of _course_ you stop.

“I wanted to let you know how much it means that someone as terrified as I am is taking a stand. I-I, mean, I’m sorry, probably more terrified than I am. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine, the things you’ve been through.”

“Thank you.” You start with that, warm and simple, and you let yourself mean it in isolation for a beat. “I don’t think that there’s any use in comparison like that- I don’t think I consider the rankings you’ve given our respective sufferings as true as you do, either, I don’t think I would order them the same way, but the point is they don’t need to be ordered. Neither one of us should be afraid. You shouldn’t be hurting.”

She looks like she’s going to fall apart shaking, and you offer your hand just an inch in front of yourself, until her eyes widen at the gesture and it makes her shake worse. You’re about to drop it when she takes your hand, and you squeeze her fingers, to let her know it’s okay.

“It’s good to meet you,” you continue, when she’s had space to speak and chosen not to. “Do you want to walk and talk a while longer? There’s extra meat we have to use by tonight; it would be nice to have someone else for an early dinner.”

The woman in front of you looks at you like she’s unsure if she’s allowed to say no to you, and unaware if she is allowed to say yes. The hemoanonymity has complicated this for others before, but she’s felt the warmth of your hand. She can assume you’re lowblooded.

You take a small step back, hold your palms open, and smile with closed lips. “It’s okay,” you continue. Her eyes are averted down, as they have been throughout, but it’s just now that you realize yours haven’t met hers yet, and wonder if that’s why. (You know that isn’t why. You know why.)

On the offchance that it is, though, you give it a gentle try. Your eyes try to find hers for two, three seconds, and ultimately it _is_ that brief little kind of connection you hear it’s supposed to be for people, if none too often with strangers.

(On the Alternia Before, you’re willing to bet it was with strangers. You just wouldn’t really know, with as little time you get, and whose eyes you’re looking through. You remember one instance, though. With a friend, not a stranger: You’d had something very sincere to say to the girl with the bright red glasses, and so it had seemed worth the effort and the off-kilter loudness it leaves in your head. You understand the connection. It’s like they’re drilling too far into your pan to keep up with, or you too much into theirs to remember words, but here and there, when trust is called for, when it’s a moment that matters, it can almost be something you want. It was much less terrified, less tenuous, than this, but for a second, the planet feels normal.)

She scampers off, looking over her shoulder.

And the whole interaction just scrubs at your insides in a nasty way like steel wool, scraping out the inside of a pot, but it’s definitely not any fault of hers. On the walk home you keep trying to figure out if you were persistent enough, if there was more you could have said or anything you held back from that could have been more genuinely validating- and if you did, then _why._

You offered your hand. To you, a brief (brief) squeeze is a gesture of affection and reassurance, but in a split-second’s panic it could look like you’re trying to keep her here.

You didn’t make assumptions. Offering dinner doesn’t make it sound like you think she’s not feeding herself or not being fed. It does sound a little like she has at least the freedom enough come and eat with you, which you know isn’t necessarily the case; being out and about now doesn’t mean she’s allowed to at every hour of the night. Dinner’s a reasonable time to be expected back.

You didn’t say that if she did have some curfew she would be breaking—or if she didn’t, but home still hurts—that she just doesn’t have to go back.

There’s a reason you didn’t. It’s overwhelming. It never works, it never makes anyone feel safer, but it’s—maybe it would have mattered, this once, maybe it would have been needed. Maybe she’s one of the very few on Alternia who are stretched out to the edges of their proverbial chains wrung thin enough to be near-breaking, and only waiting to hear a chance and take it.

She assumed you’re “more terrified” than she is. That your life’s one she can’t imagine. You’d talked, in the sermon, about being usually hiveless. You’d talked about living out at the edges of Alternia without explaining why. You roll your answer around in your head, striving to remember exactly the shape of the words you said, that you wouldn’t say them the same, that there was so little you would say.

...And if this is sounding wildly out of context, or like an absurd kind of mental catastrophe without any grounded real world framing (you’ve been accused, before, of mental catastrophes without any grounded real world framing), then picture this:

You’re four sweeps old.

The world only is as big as mainplanet Alternia and that’s its surface doubled, because you know about its underground, and tripled, because of the vision thing.

That is so, so much larger than it is for every other little lowblood you will ever meet.

That is so rarely limited by walls and doors, chains and ships and threat of drowning or lifeless void around you if you tried to leave them and once, when you hid inside a cellar but were too young to understand why, you cuddled into your mother’s arms safe and warm and marveled at the experience. You were as quiet as a mouse.

The world is as big as as far as the outdoors will take you, and they will not take you far from your mother on a good night, because you’ve learned very well how much she loves you and how much you love her, but still it’s rolling deserts, valleys filled with pink-white tufts of hopbeasts’ breath and wrinkling forest fungus in every color you’ve ever seen. It’s meandering along streams ‘til their end or ‘til they slow to a trickle or halt at the edge of a cliff, or ‘til Trollmom brings her forearm down like a guard rail, bumping gently against your chest, and steeeeeers you around in the other direction because this adventure’s stopped feeling safe. It’s every wartflanked croakbeast in them, and every dragonfly that when you sit still enough lands on your nose and all of the hums in the air between them.

That is so, so much smaller than it is for every other little lowblood you will ever meet.

You’ve never waited to be shunted off planet and never stared at your skin until three in the afternoon wondering which bits will be removed, what it will look like with ports embedded, or given yourself a premolt tattoo because fuck it the work would get erased anyway but you won’t have the chance after adulthood.

Sweeps later, right now, people will still say you were uniquely wrung out and spat upon; resilient in ways a spectrabound lowblood can never understand.

“Thank you.”

You will silently never agree.

...

“Don’t you make fun of me, I knew damn well you would be coming home in one piece.” Trollmom’s pointing her fork across the table at you like an accusatory finger, which is a little less threatening with an accidentally-well-done chunk of antlerbeast flank flopping off the end.

“It wasn’t a fair joke,” you answer, and you mean it. Your trollmom worries a lot, and that’s because she’s had to. You don’t mind it. She doesn’t mind it; you both mind the backbending praise people give her for taking on the heroically tragic task of caring about a life that’s going to end anyway.

It just happens that she does, and you can try to be as kind to the troll who raised you as you are to people you haven’t met yet.

She pouts at you suspiciously for a second longer, and then it seems like you’ve overestimated how much you might have hurt her, because she grins- and she prods your arm, and that’s a little code between you two, for when you’re not reading signals quite right. You smile and breathe out.

“I did. I knew the intelligent, compassionate, perceptive young troll I raised and I know being seven and getting into trouble,” she continues, with a waggle of the eyebrows. This is usually the part where you roll your eyes as loudly as you can (you find her past fascinating, actually, but she has much more fun this way) and she chides you, thoroughly tickled, for being so rude.

You shove out a little “hah,” and in retrospect didn’t plan it very well, because your brain was still honed in on drawing fork-lines through the mashed tuberfruits she didn’t even need to use today with dinner, because now you’ll both fill up and the rest of the meat will spoil.

Glancing up, it does not seem like you can save this.

“Kankri.”

“Mm, m mouf s full.”

“You’ve just shoveled that into it for the first time tonight, I’m watching you.”

“Judging when and how much I choose to eat as a troll who owns and best understands my body is an inherently authoritarian act.”

“Kankri Maryam, if you have ever abused a tuberfruit paste worse than this then my walking carcass has never touched daylight.”

You take a breath, then respond very evenly. “It’s _just Kankri.”_

“...It’s just Kankri,” she amends. She, too, took a pause to deescalate. “Kankri. You are abusing your tuberfruit paste.”

You are abusing your tuberfruit paste, a very farmlike set of rows dug through it until you’d started to scratch up your nutrition plateau. That’s not good, these need to last.

You set your fork carefully to the side of your nutrition plateau, and tap your frondpad at the floor instead.

“When you were still in caverns, you were under constant orders, but you were technically free.” You’re quoting her, not making assumptions. “A jadeblood isn’t under lock and key, it’s just that her social status is.”

“That’s true,” your trollmom answers, wrinkling her eyebrows.

“And when you left the world became a thousand times more terrifying, you became in far more danger, but you were still, in many ways, freer.”

“With no doubts.”

“As though you escaped some of Alternia for another, more distant piece of it.” You’ve stopped quoting her, now, though you’re trying to reflect back something accurate and test if it sticks.

“...One could say so.” “I’m sorry, should I—?”

“Kankri, darling, whatever has set your thinkpan buzzing so loudly, it is not solely the condition of my disgraced jadeblood status.”

Suddenly, and increasingly, your acid tract is feeling very full. You ate breakfast this evening. You feel the skin on your back, its precisely one scar, and are reminded of Kankri-from-Before’s hyperawareness of the newness of his shoes.

Gulping only succeeds in making your throat sticky instead of raw, and you say, too quietly for her to hear, “We didn’t need to use the tuberfruits.”

“What?”

“We didn’t need to use the tuberfruits.”

“Oh, Kankri.”

She stands up, and you say “I’m _fine_” in a tone that would be more fitting to Kankri from Before than to you, because you’ve never once rejected her love. Her hand hesitates, in the air, instead of landing on your shoulder. She’s stepped about a foot in distance, around the side of the very small table.

You grab her hand and complete the gesture, loving her strict policy for consent and hating that you did that.

Your other moves in quiet, swiping motions as if to gently dispel something from the air.

“I met a woman after speaking today,” you begin, because that’s, really, the shape of it. You leave tomorrow. You will never know if she’s okay.

Trollmom agrees to try to find her again, for just an hour, first thing tomorrow.

You were still under constant orders but you were technically free. You left it and became freer; we left it because I can be freer or dead. You left it and moved into constant danger; we left it for safety from constant danger already.

‘As terrified as I am,’ or more, or less. ‘I can’t imagine the things you’ve been through’ and you can’t imagine hers.

The world is as wide as everywhere but a consistent hive and everywhere but a cage, it’s narrow enough to keep away from movie theaters and even lowblood wrigglers’ arcades and to never set foot in an auction.

_So which am I. So which am I. So which am I._


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter used to have a ridiculous error in it (leaving stuff from drafted notes to self in) and five of you left kudos anyway. Thank you.

ii. _We accept the radical notion that a person does not need a place to be justifiably a person, one with value, one with worth, and one with insight._

The next sermon is also small and impromptu, and the next sermon-adjacent thing you interject into the public consciousness after it is during a startlingly damn effective intervention into an arrest—you save a troll’s life, and people start saying the things that’ve been floating around in your brain before you’ve had to say them, and you start to see proof everywhere of how much this could work.

The _next_ time it’s out front of one of the few corner stores seedy enough to let you hang around the front door so long as the conversation you generate’s good enough for business; and the _next_ is a meeting you announced and arranged with the people you met there, gathering intentionally, instead, just after sunset a half-hour outside of town; and the _next_ is quietly, between just three of you, while you’re bandaging someone’s hand.

You’ve sat staring at the ceilings of tents and renthives and abandoned cavern entrances among the wastes for hours, tossing a phrase or a paragraph back and forth with your trollmom until it’s parseable. You’ve spoken in bars after ending barfights—you’ve spoken and started them, or, at least, spoken until someone else is riled enough to start them. You know that the violent choices others make in those instances belong to them, but when you’re speaking in such a way as to break up established patterns of safe and predictable fears so as to bring in radical and wildly new ones, you know you must do so responsibly. You try again. And again.

Tonight, you’ve been getting to know this particular city for weeks, and it’s been long enough that you’ve arranged a meeting place people can actually come and feel safe. It’s a warehouse, huge and cold and with very, very little light. Most of you are seated on crates, or large tires with treads the size of your closed fist, a few trolls more comfortable standing. Two, though, have volunteered to stand by the door, and they’re cycling in and out with a third, which means one will quietly come back into the circle and poke another on the shoulder to switch shifts every ten, fifteen minutes.

You’re in the factory district end of a relatively neglected urban center. It was something like you’ve— not never seen before, because you have, but you’ve never understood how they work.

Technically, absolutely no one here is free.

“The question it always comes around to for me is why.”

It’s not the world’s most fucking novel thought. You’re pulling threads together from conversations yesterday, mostly. The hums of assent in the crowd are soft and uneasy, but they’re there.

”If we need to _hurt_ for the sake of order then what _for,_ if we need to _sacrifice_ something for progress then what _for;_ I could ask all night why the sacrifice needs to be _us,_ or why lowblooded fears are the fallout of highblooded ones that matter, but there has to be a thing we’re _afraid_ of. There has to be something, even before we _begin_ to question whose posture nubs it falls upon, that we’re afraid will happen if we don’t uphold it.

“I don’t think we’re afraid of peace.

“I think we’re afraid it’s impossible, I think that there are people who are afraid of _disorder_ or afraid of _worthlessness_ or of lacking a _place_ and I need to ask again what _for._

“And as long as _progress_ is the ultimate answer, as long as Empire is an entity and a universal truth and a thing to strive for, then we’ve—yes, all of us are going to spend our lives trying and failing to ever prove we’re quite enough. We’re set up to justify our existence, and justify our breath, and promise that food and shelter and patience won’t be wasted on us because if we return enough value to this _thing,_ we’ll be enough. It’s why people die of exhaustion, it’s why we know that every now and then a lowblood or twelve is going to die in the streets at the hands of a highblood’s rage and I have never been inside an indigo or purpleblood’s nugbone—” (no one here knows exactly what you are, but you don’t think that’s a stretch, you don’t think that despite clinging to the fortunate grey that still stretches itself in concealing-enough patches over your irises you’ve said something that damns your point) “—but I _swear_ it’s why the rage bubbles up so loudly. We are allowed exactly three sharp squares for kindness.

“Anywhere else—if you feel the inherent wrongness of a planet like this pushing down on you from all sides, if you are vaguely aware of the sheer amounts of pain around you and yourself only as a vehicle for it but allowed no friends to lean on—rage is the _option._ Rage is the option that comes with privilege, and crumbling, forever-internal hurt is the option without it, and I have to. I have to fucking ask what needs us to live like this.

“Because the thing is that if progress is for _Empire,_ or for the _species,_ or for _trollkind,_ then we have to ask what those things are. And it’s people. It always comes down to people. I cannot find, and tell me if you can, any other abstract good in the universe to base things upon.”

You have to remind yourself of the pause you take here. Slowly, the block catches on that you _meant_ “tell me if you can,” and there’s some shifting and shuffling, quiet. Someone says: “The messiahs.”

“I can’t bring myself to _care_ what any messiahs want if they aren’t interested in taking care of trolls, all of us, over death mandates.”

No one has anything to say to that.

And so you go on, after the moment is settled: it has to be people. It always has to come down to people. If you _begin_ there, rather than beginning with who’s at the top and why we should work for them, it becomes apparent that there isn’t a reason. Every single thing this Empire is predicated on is logically circular, and every single thing it demands for order is that we hurt each other or are hurt, to no end.

“I’ve never been able to find anything of value to strive for but each other,” you say, at the end. “I’ve never been able to find anything to cosmically rank me, as though we need to be one above the other and not side-by-side holding each other up, but I know that if life is worth anything that thing has to be kindness. And it _is_. Horrorterrors’ Emissary herself, it is.”

“And maybe we can’t undo every way this planet has been constructed to damage us in a night. I’m not asking that. But we can change how we value each _other._ We can help each other survive, because that’s worth something.

Your voice lowers, and you say, “I want all of you to know you don’t have to stay here tonight. It’s also time to turn the conversation around to the block, but before we do, I want you all to know we are prepared for that. We have food, we have imperfect and fluctuating shelter but it belongs to _you_ and it is free if you will take it, and we have the promise of safety in community.”

“Do you have suppressants?”

You try to be aware of your facial expression, and not blink too much, outwardly. Your gut’s twisted without your consent. “No. We would never subject you with that, or seek to dictate what is happening in and what you are able to do with your body. Your power is yours.”

The troll who asks has opened their mouth a few times before you finish. You figured it was worth getting out the full sentiment anyway, and it probably was, but they add, rather sheepishly, “No, thank you. It’s that—at least three of us would go into withdrawal.”

The sick feeling takes a turn for the worse.

You schoolfeed your voice even, though. The last impression you want to leave is that, in your empathy for someone, _they’ve_ hurt _you._ “Where would we get those?” And the conversation winds down that track for a while.

The next is about what freedom even is when it’s freedom on the fringes. The next is about what the worth of a troll means. The next cuts that third one the fuck short with—

“No, thanks, I’d like to jump back to _freedom_ please.”

You’re getting ready to make your promises that you will, but the younger troll who’d chimed in about the worth of a person very emphatically defers to their elder, and so of course, you take their cue, and stick a pin in their point to come back.

“What’s on your pan?”

“Just thinking about the chucklefucks kicking back in Tiffbout wondering how much gold they can get by with betting on a fighting ring wriggler and still cut their losses, while we’re here talking about this.”

You don’t know where Tiffbout is, truthfully, but. “I think about those things too.” You do. “I firmly believe that every one of them is equally drawn to be kind. That those Alternia is stacked against are targeted and hurt with more direct trauma, more consistency, but we are all hurting, and we will all learn to lift each other up. I believe that whether or not they know they need this now, they can give it.”

“But they’re not gonna move first, or do you think—”

You let out a breath. “If I could reach them, I would. Already, we carry a disproportionate burden. All I know how to do and survive, right now, is teach each other how to survive it, help each other survive it, but I do not intend to let it stay that way.”

“I think you want me to stop serving the bag of bulges who owns me and start serving someone else, just let this guy say who—”

“There’s a difference,” you begin, “between kindness and servitude. It’s a complicated one.”

“Here’s what’s on my pan.”

She slows her speech down so that there isn’t so much of a burnout accent, and you’re opening your mouth to tell her she doesn’t have to, but she holds up a hand to you, harshly and without negotiating, and you realize how much your constant interjecting is leaving her tripping over words and you cut it out.

“You’re going to have to be real fucking careful, telling slaves that we as an inherently kind species are solely defined by how we are _good_ to other people.”

“Oh.” Fuck. _Fuck._

“Let us finish a sentence sometime.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I've got to fess up to making one edit to this one after zine publication.)

iii. _We reject the constructed Alternian ideal that will tell you your kindness is weakness, and in the same breath that the belief that you deserve it, the notion that you could demand it, is entitlement._

There was a longer conversation after that. You sat down together, and you thanked her, and looking back, it went on much too long after you’re sure she wanted to go home. Mostly, she was tired.

She didn’t come with you. No one there came with you. It turns out that, though you could have your conversations unsurveilled as long as you planned them very carefully during breaks and trusted everyone’s silence for each other’s sake, everyone there is—chipped. Microchips, in people. You know there’s a way to break them, because one troll who’d done it for a friend before very quietly raised a hand and the whole room went hush when they made the offer.

It just doesn’t come without risk.

You’ve made some progress since back then. People freed, people helped; always, always learning.

Tonight is different from any before it, though. Tonight you’re breaking into a one-building slave holding facility: Not a mock subgrub with scattered supervisors and borders you’d managed to skirt past as long as you’re only passing through, or a lavish hive with one live-in slave who is allowed out to do the shopping and leaves alone, or goes back, first, to try to convince the rest, but the kind with chains, and concrete walls, and, sometimes, biocables. The first time you stepped inside one, you were eight sweeps old, not entirely aware what you were doing, and lucky you got out alive.

The second time comes with much more planning.

The things you know about the untitled cement-slab building on the furthest edge of the cement-slab-building side of town are as follows:

It’s an “experimental facility.” Very few trolls are permitted to know what’s going on inside it, and that means very few are permitted in or around it. Because of that, it remains almost constantly understaffed.

Fact two: it’s surrounded by barbed wire, blooming in great coils around the window. That’s not much of an expense, but still excessive enough that it did make you suspect that it needs it. You know that psionics who have not burnt out are generally unchipped, because at anything beyond the lowest energy levels, the signal gets interrupted. You don’t know the specifics.

You know the facility at least sometimes does its torture on psionics because of an accident someone told you happened three sweeps ago, and because when a psionic is the source of an explosion, no matter what the smell, no matter whether you can tell if they’re still alive after it (this is always what you look for first)— the form surrounding burns take is visually distinctive.

You were made to wonder, after spotting the frankly excessive amounts of wire, how low-tech the rest of the security might be. Someone said the black market has their finger dipped into this place, hence the nondescript building and little info, then again, someone said the Empire did. (You- you haven’t been asking around too obviously. That would be unwise. It’s just that to a lot of people, that explosion was the most exciting and noteworthy thing that’s happened here in some sweeps. Sometimes most exciting just means the most emotion they’ve felt in a while.)

Because you didn’t know, you’ve proceeded with as much caution as you can anyway, but it was the first thing that made you look at this horrible, as yet unknown to you worse-than-deathtrap and go _this can work._

The once-slaves who already _are_ traveling with you, two currently out of a historical seven overall, didn’t come from anything like this. But they confirm with what they know that you’re not totally shithive, and this can work.

(Their phrasing. You’re okay with being a little bit shithive, but it’s not about this.)

In all the Disciple’s weeks of being in the right place at the right time, she has seen that the entire guard staff seems to arrive and leave on the same small omniscuttlecoach, rotating thrice a day. The one troll in a different uniform, whom you have to assume is a scienstiff (or else a more horrible, mediculling- or engineerending-bent career, depending on whether or not their work is considered to be on people), arrives independently: They start their night around seven P.M., and, though a rustblooded driver has picked them up on occasion if they stay too close to daylight, seem to prefer to walk.

Someone who repaired its exterior electrical systems once found you after a sermon to _suggest_ this same plan, when you all were already working on it. You had to tactfully not tell them where the Disciple was at that exact second just in case.

They know that the facility runs on stored power. They don’t know if someone held there powers it up, or where else it comes from, or when, and so as espionage goes, you all have a new task (you help with the espionage least, your Trollmom second-least, the escaped ex-slaves in your company never. You stick out like a sore thumb, your Trollmom sticks out like a slightly less sore thumb, and you are never going to put someone who ran away from slavery in extreme and explicit danger of recapture if you can help it).

In any case, you don’t wind up working out when exactly things get charged, but you do work out where the fusebox is. So there’s a nifty shortcut.

And so: Get there at the sunrise guard shift, convince the four trolls on duty then out, one way or another, and cut any fuses linked to surveillance. Arshel, one of the trolls traveling with you, teaches you how to identify those. Have Trollmom waiting _right the fuck there_ on a cue, so that in the event that you were _wrong_ about the fuses and cut someone’s, worst case scenario, life support, she’s there to get it _immediately_ back online. It had taken a lot of fucking maneuvering, a lot more than that, but you’re in.

The interior of the building is as dismal as the outside has been, nondescript cameras lining the walls as you’d expected but with no indicator lights blinking.

They, the cameras, probably once activated any number of more violent security systems. Fortunately for the Disciple’s life and yours at best, and those of everyone else here at worst, you’d done your shit right to get those offline, too. Or maybe they’d just needed the camera circuits to function. Again, your job and expertise aren’t running logistics, but you’d better damn well be confident in what other people are telling you. (There happen to be a good five people at home, currently, whom you trust with your life. The moment you stepped through a single threshold in this building, you entrusted them with several others.)

The facility, aside from the garage and office you’d walked through on your way in, is one vast block. Medicull cots and tables on full display, configurations of biotechnologies you don’t recognize taking up half of the space. They are the only thing here that is maintained, you think; the kind of meticulous clean that never stops smelling of bleach and doesn’t match the porous concrete of the floor.

Almost everyone here is at or under seven sweeps old. It’s made you very mindful of how you, an adult, hold yourself in the block. Everyone is psionic whether rustblooded or gold, and everyone wakes from the one half sopor patch they were allotted to stare at you the moment you set foot inside.

You tell them everything you can.

You tell them that you’re here as a friend, where the guards are, that any power dedicated to security is down. That the power hasn’t been drained from the battery to do it, no one will need to work twice over.

You tell them about the movement. That it exists—that there are entire swaths of people, if in trickles, if still breaking the inertia and supporting each other past fear, looking at the Empire and stepping away.

You decided before you came in that you would tell them about how you are mandated to not exist, and yet you do, and have now ten sweeps running. That you know about staying hidden. That you won’t be the safest troll to be with, but that you know every single trick and you can stay by their side as long as they want, if they come, that you’ll love to be their friend and love to know them, but that you can teach them the tricks and say goodbye, too. That this is freedom, it’s freedom to stay with you or leave you and come again and leave again if they please, not a master by another name. You tell them about the communities you’ve met, people who shouldn’t be alive but are, trolls who weren’t going to be free but bolted before their wrigglerhood ended or made it out themselves. You’re not the expert on escaping slavery. You’ve met the experts, though, on these kinds of pasts and freedoms. These trolls are the experts on theirs.

You’re just a vessel to pass the rest forward. You know what’s out there.

You tell them about the Alternia we had before, about these rebuttals to the ideas of all we are capable of being and all we were meant to be. You tell them where you see it proven today. You don’t need to be right to know peace is possible. You don’t need to be right to know trolls can be kind. You’ve seen kindness every night since you were hatched, and you took what’s arguably a chance and your trollmom and you aren’t just a fluke, and you’ve observed a thousand smaller steps toward peace. They don’t need to believe the visions. You know what’s inside you is real, but you aren’t running a religion.

You tell them about how the fact of their blood has nothing to do with their worth. About how even if strength matters, a blueblood owns his own, so why can’t a psionic own theirs, so what makes bending an iron rod in two worth more if you can do it with your arms than with your pan. And after that, after the groundwork is laid, why does it _matter._ Why the fuck would the quantity of labor we produce matter, why the fuck would someone else own it, what _makes_ a blueblood own their strength but also own a psionic’s—you don’t get too far into theory. But that isn’t divine right. It isn’t even the fact that they _can,_ and so _should_. It’s millennia of systems that have been laid down, that no one has earned, that no one has the right to earn over them.

You tell them “I know we can love each other beyond the few neat squares we’re prescribed because I know I can love each one of you. I know we can hold each other up and keep each other afloat as friends or distant strangers because I know how many people’s love has kept me alive, and because removed from everything this Empire wants us to be, the moment we step away into a space where it stops wringing us dry and into someplace we can breathe, we can be okay. I know that you don’t need to like me or be like me for me to want kindness for you, to offer it to you, and to expect nothing back, because the sheer idea of any of us coming closer to healing is enough.” The sheer thought of any one of them owning their lives, whether or not you see another second of it, is enough. On second thought, as you run through phrasing in your head, you tell them that, too.

And then you open your hands down at your sides, palms forward, and it’s their turn to speak.

Eventually, someone does.

“...I want to check the cameras. Fix the cameras.”

A taller kid with horns bent to nearly stab into each other, still scrubbing sopor smudges off their temple, stands to make the request. Every motion is against the wall instead of toward you, but the Disciple would later clue you in on how they’d been trying to decide whether to rush you- dampeners on, and the time and tools to take them off safely all the way back home, that’s the option they’d have to demonstrate loyalty.

You nod, taking a small step back to invite them forward. “You’re welcome to, I only ask that for your friends’ sake, if you find confirm they are off and _can_ repair them—”

“_No._” The troll who cuts in is one who caught your eye earlier. He, like you, is distinctly recently post-molt, and so he must be just about ten.

You’ve been told, when you’re not being called a young unruly punk who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, that you seem old for your age. You don’t really know what that means on you, because you don’t see it. Your trollmom thinks it’s the two lifetimes thing. You remind her you don’t remember past six in the first one.

You have this split-second thought, and you worry that it’s offensive, that that’s what he looks like.

It’s really not the creak to his knees, though, or the sore stoop to his shoulders. You have the latter of those; that would be hypocritical. You still don’t think it looks particularly old. It’s not the stress-greys that are coming in around the temples, because every psionic who is able to make it long enough gets those eventually, and that _would_ be hemophobic. The shuffle to his step is psionic overexertion in his pan; that, that’s the same deal.

It’s more the way he stands in the space. Gleaning things from body language is still lost on you, watching for fear you’re committed to getting a handle on and watching for aggression you’re hopeless at learning, but it’s not something that he’s feeling or expressing. Watching him walk the two barefoot steps he takes toward you, the cracks on his frondpads mirroring the cracks in the concrete floor and his one-piece suit layered with the same dust, it feels like he’s been here forever and is going to be here forever.

You also know, you realize, with no threat display at all and no certainty as to why you know, that he would kill you for any troll in this block.

“They’re off. I’d feel it, hear them running fucking constantly. Not that kind of trick. Sit down.”

He speaks with a lisp, slowly, and deliberately moderated, with each sentence already decided before its first word is out. Sometimes, he sways a little unevenly toward overly loud, and clamps _immediately_ back down to overly soft.

“It’s Signless, right?” You had introduced yourself, yes. You’ll stop doing that in high-risk situations where people haven’t sought you out themselves in a sweep or so, it becomes too much of a threat—a tiny ounce of extra risk and the removal of plausible deniability to everyone who heard it and can now have it mind read, chucklevoodooed out of them, a little smear of your color on people who didn’t agree to be a target—but even now you don’t place a magnificent emphasis on the title so much as wedge it in where relevant, so it’s nice to hear someone take the time use it. The way he does feels like he’s grinding it between his teeth and looking for flaws. It’s okay, though. You’re not hurt.

“It is. How should I call you?”

“We don’t have those.”

“I’m sorry. I know. Would you be comfortable, instead, with me calling you friend?”

He shifts on his feet for a long moment before he answers, and then goes sharply still and you’re reminded that he can see you staring. You direct your eyes back up to the scaling skin between his eyebrows. He stops paying attention to your eyes visibly, and flicks his instead back to the Disciple, who has hung back, aware of her blood.

There’s a fifteen second space. You’re counting because you learned, once you started leaving more of them more pointedly, that people aren’t comfortable with making them too long, either. All you can try to do is make room.

“It’s alright,” you continue, “I make the offer because it’s shorthand to make it clear that knowing you matters to me, not because I need something to call you by—”

“You really are that bent on being” (and he gets very soft; you resist the urge to lean in. You make out “...aren’t you”).

“I’m sorry, I just couldn’t hear, being—?”

“_Contagious._” You could have figured that out. Context clues. There’s supposed to be acid behind his voice, but the way he says the word you can’t tell if he genuinely believes it.

You take a pause to consider—you’ve worked out your answer, but the body language to go with it takes a second longer—and then smile with closed lips, and gently nod. “I don’t consider friendship a disease. I don’t know which arguments you’ve heard that it is, though, although I know the ones I’ve heard.”

“Enough,” he answers, soon enough that it can’t have been in response to the words you actually said, “to prove I was schoolfed.”

The tension in the air is building, and if it’s doing that for you, then it’s hard to believe you’re alone. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

He huffs, you wait, and finally—”What, were you asking us.”

“Whether you’re comfortable with that, yes.”

“...Sure.”

Most of the wrigglers were already sitting, anyway. A couple that had stood with him sit. One stays standing as long as the adult troll does.

The Disciple, bless her, leans loosely against your shoulder as far from ready to leap to her feet as is possible.

Once you’re all seated, it’s silent, and you’re faced with deciding who speaks first. You go. “What have you heard?

When a psionic glares at you the word becomes literal, too bright to look at. Meeting his eyes is easier for you than it is with most strangers for arbitrary reasons you aren’t sure of, and harder because eventually, you start to see spots. “What have I _seen._”

“What have you seen.”

He might have been glaring as a challenge, actually. When you glance away first is when he lets his breath out to actually speak again. “You’ve probably got the space for attachments. We fucking don’t.”

People cycling in and out, people being bought and sold, people dying. “I’m both amazed that you’ve found ways to protect yourself against the situation you never deserved, and sorry that you ever had to, but you do not need to stay here.”

You talk with your hands when you’re trying to find the shape of a point, but you don’t do it when people have the capacity to be scared by you, or by sudden movements. You won’t shrink _in_ on yourself, but you do take the Disciple’s hand instead of making large sweeping motions with yours, and she takes it as a fidget toy immediately.

“I promise you, out there— not just the Alternia you grew up on, the one you know better than I do, but the space we’ve built— it’s still hard. But there’s _room._ I promise you we protect each other as much as we can, and once the world feels even the slightest bit secure around you, there’s more to gain than to lose from loving and being loved. I promise that, building the community we are, our pity glands are things we need to budget less strictly.”

“You promise trolls are going to stop being trolls because you and a couple dozen other flukes have managed.”

“You’re right, I think, that I shouldn’t make promises for other people. I can tell you that I intend to make it easier.”

The Disciple speaks up, almost too quietly for the space because she knows she can be so loud, “I can tell you that I intend to make it easier. Beautiful people.” Peo-_purr_ makes it in on the edge of her voice, as one of those places where it’s her accent more than a pun. “I didn’t know people could be beautiful.”

Squeezing her hand, you continue, again, “I believe that I’m not special, and that everywhere we create space, the world is changing.”

“You’re going to tell all these gutterblood kids they have something to hope for and then tgth-” He almost _bites_ his tongue as if in punishment for tripping on his fangs, finding words again in a very calculated way- “they’re gonna get hurt for knowing it.”

“Ah,” you say, and when you hear it, it’s very quiet.

“You think you can sit there and pick me apart.”

“No, I don’t.” Something settles very hard and uninvited in your chest, abruptly. You have to force yourself to be conscious of your face, because the thing it was going to do was probably, in a hit-with-a-scuttlecoach way, a _smile_. Not because it’s possible for you to feel happy in a setting like this, at a time like this. More like the kind that comes with an inappropriate laugh when everything’s too heavy for a troll who doesn’t know how to feel those things with sincerity, or like you’ve just heard a piece of a very sad story that reminds you of a different one you forgot existed, because—

What’s hit you as he said those words is the undeniable feeling that _you knew him._

Like you were in a recreationblock you used to know very well, bickering over what would’ve been very nearly a falling-out if your five-sweep-old friendships back there, Before, hadn’t been impossibly resilient.

Contrary to what he thinks, it has nothing to do with how intensely you know you don’t know him now. You don’t think you can sit here and pick him apart.

The Disciple clears her throat gently, a sound that doesn’t stretch past your auriculars sponge clots. (On second thought, maybe it does—he said he could hear electricity moving through the cameras.) “Befurr this,” her rrs soft but, you note with a hint of a smile, present; she gets embarrassed of them in public, “I thought so too.”

He looks tired, doesn’t bother as much not to trip on his fricatives. “You’re the convert who’s gonna convert me.”

You look to her on that. “No,” though, she answers very simply, “I’m not.”

“I’m sure, miss. Good cop?”

“Her title is the Disciple,” and he raises an eyebrow at you, and that did perhaps not help the point that you’re not a religion. It didn’t occur to you. _Miss_ and _sir_ and your rush to address them could probably obscure your judgment of a lot of things, in exactly the opposite way the words were designed to.

“Or ‘furriend’ is okay.”

He snorts, with effort, like it needs to say something. Genuinely you wish you knew what.

“I—” and “It’s—” you and the Disciple start at once, and so you pause, and you gesture lightly to her, and she goes on.

“It’s not a prroblem,” she says. “We don’t really use ‘miss’ and ‘sir’ when talking to equals, that’s all. I bet a purrson could. Could you do that with words?” Before you can say the thing you’ve opened your mouth to say, she does: “We don’t have time fur fancy semantic theories right now, though. I wanted you to know I used to think so too. I didn’t believe in kind people when I first came along. Just Signless. I just knew it _should_ be true.”

(You remember the quaver to her voice, still very out of practice: It’s nothing, right? It’s easy, right, when there’s nothing to leave behind?)

You jump off of that, grateful. “I firmly believe that you should have the chance to carve out what you deserve, whether we can provide it on a guarantee or not.”

His eyes do something the Disciple or Trollmom would understand. You, you don’t know this one, you’re mystified.

“Well I think want to go.” Oh, oh, it’s your friend who wanted to check the cameras.

They are, as was your first impression, very tall, but you also finally notice they’re trying their very damndest to make themself look taller. They stood to say it, and, no matter how smoothly and slowly you move, flinch when you stand after them. You show your palms, open, your chin further forward than your horns. You step back, once, twice, and then you speak. “You’re welcome to stay with us as long as you want to stay, and you’re welcome to follow me out of this building and then no further at all.”

They look at you for a long minute, maybe thinking, maybe awaiting some cue to speak. But you wait, still, and they ultimately say, “I think I want to stay there.” They cross the room to you.

“I think I wanna go too.”

This is when you smile, it breaking open with relief, and they cross the block more quickly and stand between their fellow runaway and you.

They’re the first of eight trolls, all in all, who cross over to you. The troll who’s been speaking the most and the troll who waited for him to sit before wait on the other side as the ninth and tenth.

“The block hasn’t gotten any quieter,” he says, and it means something to everyone else here but you. You look to your side— the Disciple didn’t understand it either. Trollmom’s still waiting vigilantly outside.

The wriggler next to him, one of the youngest, speaks up. “Them or us?”

He jerks his head at you, and coincides the gesture with a sharp _sh_. The _sh_ isn’t for you.

The same kid says “...It’s loud for me all the time, right?” and he looks _ill._

All of the trolls who’ve come over to stand with you are six or seven. When she comes over, she makes it six, seven, or five. Now, now that you’re finished with most of your speaking, you let it wrench your acid tract half out of you.

He takes a very long, slow breath between flared nostrils, flexes and closes his hands, and says “You can grab any of our prescriptions from the office somewhere. I am guessing that you know how to pick a lock.” You didn’t use that skill today, but you, in fact, do. Each syllable is very careful again when he’s talking to you.

“Are you coming?” the Disciple offers in a casual way you will one night get a grasp of, still smothered all over in love, and he says

“In a minute.”

Everyone is safely in the office when the medicull side of the main block explodes behind you.


	4. Chapter 4

iv. _One wonders why the things power fights so hard to silence are the things our nature is supposed already to predispose us against._

You’ve been thinking lately, about names, and how to own them.

When you were anywhere from one to three nights old, your mother named you by sheer accident. Impulsivity, an encyclopedic knowledge of what a troll’s name should sound like, with reference to the available hatchname registry both running and discontinued, and a sudden confrontation with the fact that she looked at you and saw a troll.

If it weren’t for the same instinct that gave her trouble looking at you without a name to call you by, you might not be alive: One doesn’t go to the trouble to identify a grub’s bloodline before they’ve decided it will live. Hatchames take investigation, whether it stops at a set of distinctive horns or gets as far as partial genetic sequencing. So when Porrim Maryam had stumbled upon a sickly mutant grub three hundred meters from the caverns’ entrance and immediately felt _wrong_ not knowing what to call it, that was a decision: this one’s a full person, it needs to be called like one. You hold an immense gratitude for it, for her love.

You hold an additional gratitude for the old first name she’d chosen, with no lusus to do it properly: Within properly-jade schoolfeeding there isn’t a need for things like engineerending or strategy or a knowledge of the surface law, so there’s room for things that are beautiful, instead. Alternian epics, works of the old prophets, mixed in with poetry from outer planets transmitted in attempts at peaceful first contact or carved on their homeworld into clay. Included in the curriculum, and censored enough (you must think), to satisfy that “yes, there were aliens” precursor to the lie “look how much worse they were.”

The old first name spins off from a dead language’s word for “perfect” (also translated "water," "silver"), though it had never been a language trolls spoke. She chose it because it was a word she’d always loved, couched within a work too disgustingly soft to serve as more than a citation for someone else’s weakness. You colonized your name.

Your name sound, another disconnected relic of a dead or dying people. (You still don’t know which.)

It hadn’t made much sense anyway. Surnames (that’s your “hatchname:” Maryam, Hermod, Tritoh) are assigned according to sign and ancestral legacy, of which you have neither. First names come from the sounds a lusus calls you, which is the mechanism through which it seemed possible for her to name you at all, but she is a troll, not a lusus. The name she should have had at her disposal, then, the weird thing she’d felt missing, would be the hatchname, but she became an ex-matron in that moment, so she’d had no right to assign a hatch.

Until you were two, you completely perplexed the poor woman by refusing to come when called. You remember the feeling, but you don’t have any memory of the resolution—just the story the way she told it. You, lying on the floor on your stomach, scribbling out one of the drawings she still wishes she’d saved of hives and cities you swore you’d been to. Her in the corner and nearly as bright as the sun, trying persistently to practice at dimming it down:

Your trollmom had called your name four times in a row to get your attention, and you’d only looked up on the fourth. She let out a small huff. “Don’t hold your colored waxtube in a fist so tightly; you’ll break these ones too and then we will be out.”

“Yes Trollmom.”

And she’d gone back to her work. This you do remember, vaguely— it looked like the strangest meditation you’ve ever seen. Before she ever _did_ figure out how to contain her glow, she would also cycle through trying to wear herself out, concocting teas with all kinds of things she knows to act as a sedative, overstuffing herself with lusus blood and winding up sick for two nights, and composing prayer poems so goofy that sometimes, you’d try to get in on composing them, and she’d (never in so many words) go “why the hell not.”

But this was still only week one of the glow, and she was only _beginning_ to be desperate to go near civilization and shop again.

You, of course, only vaguely understood the importance of this when you interrupted her. “Why you call me that?”

“Why _do_ you call me that. Call you what, sweetgrub?”

“‘Why _do_ you.’” Perplexed at your trollmom being so silly, but much less perplexed than she was, you repeated the name, and she repeated it back to you.

She’d been trying, thus far, to just peep out of one eye and maintain her quiet but vein- busting concentration, but at last ceded to the idea that this was not multitaskable. She uncrossed her legs. You’d paused in your drawing to face her, your little pout Very Serious. “On the very first night I found you,” she began, soft like a sunrise story. And she’d told it all over again, loving, and sincere, and opening her arms so you could crawl into her lap.

You were very polite and you always loved the story, you just weren’t totally sure why she was telling it.

“You look concerned, dear.”

“I remember the story.”

“Why do you call me that?”

A little helpless, your mother had continued, “Well, because it’s your name, love.”

You’d squinted, and scrunched your eyes up, stumped, like a little puzzled raisin. "But my name is Kankri."

(When you ask her what she said after that, she says, “Well, your name was Kankri.”)

It was Kankri Maryam, then, because it had been Maryam before. You don’t have a caste, or a sign, or a bloodline. And your trollmom does. She figured that meant you didn’t have a home. If you don’t have a legacy to push yourself into- if you don’t have anywhere that will claim you- it broke her heart. She wouldn’t let that happen. She claimed you.

You love her endlessly.

You’re... not. Though. You’re not a Maryam.

“Darling.” She turned off the stove, setting a lid over whatever it had been that was cooking. Scent-memory says it had too much cinnamon. You remember that time where the only seasonings you’d been able to get your grabmitts on had been cinnamon and stingermint, and so they, one or both, were what every meal tasted like for three perigees until you ran out. It must have been around then. You’d just turned seven. “What on Alternia has you saying something like that?”

“It isn’t _wrong,_ Mom.”

“You are as much _tied to me_ as any descendant I’ll never meet-”

“I’m saying it isn’t _wrong_.” The frustration bubbled in your gut and you had your wits about you enough to recognize this problem. Pause, rephrase. “‘Nothing is wrong with that.’”

Her face fell, in that soft, wounded-for-you way such that you can hear the “Oh” before she says it. “Of course it isn’t, love. You’re magnificent, a thing the Mother Grub hatched and one she intended.”

“I know.” You say, and then, “I love you.” “I love you, dear.”

This means _I know there are words if I start speaking out loud, but I need to just start spewing them to get there_. She knows it, too, because she helped you identify and distill those words.

“Of course.”

“I am casteless. I am a signless mutant and I’m going to be one for the rest of my life, I have no idea where I came from in the grand reproductive history of the planet, and until we sit down and sequence the hue-determining stretch of my genome in its entirety to find out what I would have been without one twisted allele, I am never going to know, it wouldn’t be me, I don’t have a bloodline. I don’t have a caste that’s alive. If you’re right, and censorship isn’t being stupid, and I am the first, and the one I would have isn’t neon, second-messiah red—

“If I ever work out what it was, whatever caste they belonged to, it’s disowned me. I’m without a sign and without an ancestral name. I _want_ to be honest about it. I don’t need—”

She softened in a way that doesn’t look like you’re dying. “Okay.”

“That’s the point, Mom. I don’t need a blood tie to be tied to you. We both know that.”

Her cheeks pulled at the corners of her lips stiffly, in a way that looked like it hasn’t quite stuck. You crossed to her to rest a hand at her shoulder.

You swallowed, and the unknown and unrecorded (but surely very small) quantities of blood anything like yours buried underneath the other stains on the cavern floors stuck itself to your tongue, less like copper, more like lead.

“I _want_ to be that.”

“Oh, darling, I _never_—” Wanted to cover you up, wanted to make it something wrong, wanted to slap a bandaid over you rather than watch you live, loudly, and if she’d continued the sentence you absolutely would have let her, but she lost track of it. You knew her well enough to know. You told her.

“I know.”

She’s probably a lot of why you _can_ want to be that, though you like to think you would have figured it out anyway. Kankri, the other Kankri, he fucking helps, but you like to hope you would have learned it anway.

For as inept as you feel stepping into it now, staring at the people who might’ve halfway claimed you from the outside, she gave you a lot less of Alternia to unlearn.

.....Signless, the title, that’s self-explanatory.

Meulin (the Disciple) had looked at you while you promised in soft hushed tones that yes, you were sure, and she squeezed your hand very tight and said “It’s _purrfect_” with the widest, most perplexingly frondnubbing-the-line between shit-eating and earnest kind of grin you’ve ever seen, and you think that moment is when you both started to fall a little more in love with each other.

It means “I’m fucking staying here, and you have to look at me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I used "hatchname" differently from canon because I didn't know yet that canon had actually come up with a troll word for last names - shows up somewhere in one of the friend sims, I think? Anyway, I'm resisting the urge to do any further edits on this and publishing it as published in the zine.)


	5. Chapter 5

v. _If ever someone or something endeavors to deny that your goodness, your personhood, are yours, remember which constructs stand to profit. Remember which ones profit from fooling them._

“I’m thinking The Ψiioniic,” he says, staring up at the dappled light from the tree branches above you like he’s not narrowly resisting a shit-eating grin.

_“The_ Psiioniic.”

“The _Ψψψψiioniic,_ aψψphole.” _Here’s_ the grin. Oh, he is _magnificent._ “Enunciate.”

You laugh out loud. You laugh a little bit because it’s the thing to do, or otherwise he won’t know you get the joke and you two are still okay, rather than you feeling yelled at.

You mostly laugh because it was, in fact, hilarious, and this man knows how to genuinely get a real guffaw out of you. You would be taking him more seriously, even so, if it weren’t for the fact that you have figured out that gently humor-framed seriousness is something of a Mituna-signature interpersonal style, not insincerity. Respond to the momentous announcement of his title with appropriate weight and you might as well just stab him where he sits, huh.

“You’re willing to mock the pronunciation of an illiterate, uneducated hiveless man? I thought I knew you better, Thp. Psp. Ψiioniic; am I pronouncing it right?”

He grumbles like he’s genuinely offended by the actual appreciation you slipped in there. “I guess.”

“No, let me know, Ψiioniic.”

“Ψiioniic.”

“Ψsspthsiioniic.”

“Pretend.... your inso, in-its-i-iiinsolence blaster’s full of bony ass fucking knives,” the Ψiioniic critiques, setting his sharkiest grin on display just to make the point.

“...You said ass-fucking. I heard that, that wasn’t bony-ass, that was ass-fucking, you’re not pulling one over on me; how exactly would one-”

“Mmmmmmmmwouldn’t you like two know, softmouth, sof’mth _scrub._ Waitwaitwait. Wait. The _Inciseless.”_

You laugh, and he shoves your shoulder, and you catch his hand when he does and kiss it. He sticks his tongue out at you to give the air a loud raspberry.

Grumble grumble “Mmmmm, that sounds like avoiding the challenge to me.” You are not going to pretend your mouth is full of bony ass-fucking knives. That feels horribly offensive, and like you’d be leaving his self-deprecation unargued.

You are going to try to get his name right, though, so you do think about where his teeth would be compared to his tongue and land that the way he’s written it into the title. Without calling them bony ass-fuckers.

They kind of change the shape of the vowels, too, so you go all out. “The Ψiioniic.”

He grins wide, like he’s just won a difficult prank against you. “Well, you lipsed the _the,_ but yeah, that’s it.”

Ah, the prank is making you look like an ass who makes fun of speech impediments. See, you thought it must be, but the thing is you knew you might trip over your tongue and don’t feel bad for it. Just like for once _you’re_ the one left adrift being called upon societally to pronounce things with someone else’s mouth. You let him have it because of how fucking great this is.

“How shall I make reparations for my egregious ableism today, Ψiioniic. Did I- I fucking lisped ‘reparations.’ Shit.” He _howls_ with laughter and opens an arm to you, and you, obligingly, scoot.

It’s nice, like this. The ground beneath you is damp enough to get mud all up through your cloak and into your pants enough that you’re starting to feel it, the air dense enough with fog to keep all the moisture in the earth packed in. The bark behind your backs is too rain-sodden from the night before to risk causing a scrape.

“Hmmmmmmmm.”

He scratches at his chin with an exaggerated expression, but the pause _is,_ genuinely, for thinking, and so you do not interrupt with the laugh he’s overtly playing to.

“I think this’ll do.”

He glances at you to see if you’re alright, because the two of you are still navigating the touch-during-friendship thing, and so you tip your head back over his arm— oh. It’s around your shoulders perfectly, actually, so that where your cloak got dragged a little in the scoot you don’t risk a scrape anyway. He remembers things like that fastidiously, once you’ve said them once.

You tip your head all the way back to touch the tips of your horns to the bark, and let out a breath.

There’ll be chores to do in a couple hours. It’s your turn on dishes and he’s drying, so it’s not like that’ll be the end of the conversation anyway. There’ll be hard decisions to make tomorrow about the state of your constantly-in-flux traveling troupe: either food is stretched very thin tonight, or not everyone who wants to stay can stay, and you know which direction you and almost everyone else here is leaning but that doesn’t make it your decision. But for now, it’s normal, and there’s nothing much else to do, and that’s worth things you don’t have words for.

The Disciple bounds over to you after you’ve had about twenty minutes of quiet, plunking down on the mud with her legs loosely crossed and saying, “I found the loudest pawrt of the rifurr.”

This could be two kinds of request: come with me so that I’ve got a second set of aural sponge clots, or come with me because I gotta _gotta_ show you.

You look over at the Ψiioniic with one eyebrow raised. He restrains himself, this time, from laughing at it, but makes sure you _know_ it’s narrow restraint. “Wait here, I’ll contact the press.”

“Kankritter, love of my life, would mew purr-lease put words to how much legal trouble we can get in if our dear furriend contacts the press?”

“I’m sorry, I was never schoolfed on the law.” The Ψiioniic is standing to join her, and so you do too, untrapping his arm from behind you and offering him a hand the rest of the way up.

The river is, in fact, loud. Rolling and enormous, just fifteen minutes upstream to where the branch of it you came traveling along meets three others. The Ψiioniic breathes out a “shit” in awe of it, which is an achievement, getting that from him. You all stand to look at it for a minute. There’s an island in the middle filled with dead and broken trees. For a second, you worry that that’s the part of it Meulin wanted to explore, across very real rapids, and then you remember that the love of your life is not in fact an idiot.

Still. It’s huge, and uneven, and were you not with Meulin right now, you would be identifying all of the worst ways in which it could kill you.

Instead she’s wading straight into the shallow part before the water gets white, you’re drafting the best way to offer her your cloak once she comes out and is freezing, and the Ψiioniic is getting ready to pluck her out of the water into the air, just in case.

(You’ve hit on the _perfect_ way to offer, by the way, and that’s by keeping the cloak on and just proposing you share. Trollmom’s going to say I-told-you-so if she gets sick. She’s going to say it while already making tea for her.)

_“Look,”_ she says, so you do, and what’s caught her attention is a cluster of barely-visible finbeast eggs sheltered behind the two boulders that keep the water slow here. You can’t tell if she’s just discovered them now or she pulled you all the way here to show you the quietest part of the loudest part of the river.

“How old, do you think?”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t think anything could spawn when it’s this cold.” To be clear, none of this _matters_ in the immediate life sense, it’s not like you’re going to eat them (that bright green is not the color of an egg that can be eaten). It’s curiosity.

“All dead?” the Ψiioniic offers.

She stares at his lips for a minute, moves hers like they had, and shakes her head again. “Let me find out!”

While she does whatever very, very ginger investigation she’s set her heart to, you give her the space to focus, and focus on being her ears.

“...She loves you a whole fucking lot,” the Ψiioniic intones to your right, surprising you. The way he says it is a little like he’s worried you might be upset at the unintended implication that somehow you didn’t know, but also like you really, really need to know.

You smile, glancing his way, but he does not seem troubled by the fact that you weren’t, because he’s still watching as if balanced on the tip of a pin for the moment he’ll need to snatch her from the rapids. You absolutely do not think he’ll need to. You do, still, turn your eyes forward, so that he’s not the only one worrying.

“I love her a whole fucking lot.”

Meulin sticks her tongue out at you, and signs _“Slitherbeasts.”_ You stick your tongue back, in the flickery fashion a reptile would.

Translating for the Ψiioniic, who is still learning, only occurs to you a second too late, but at the same moment that you’re about to open your squawk gaper he opens his—

“Hey, you know—” A full minute passes while you anticipate him collecting his thoughts. The first explosion should by all counts have burned him out but didn’t, but it still left a mark in his pan, and you’d be content to give the Ψiioniic hours on end in which to figure out how he wants to speak anyway. You used to be thrilled every time he opened his mouth for something other than a practical or defensive inclination that he needed to.

The feeling never faded. Now it’s just a little residual proud glow under the fact that you just like chatting with him, and hearing what he has to say.

The full minute passes and finally he elbows you in the ribs.

“Oh. ...I think I know.”

Either in the periphery of your vision or through the inches of air between you, you physically _feel_ him relax, enough that you won’t turn your head to look for risk of ruining that for him. “Yeah, it’s that.”

"I know."

You’ve said “I love you” a good four dozen times since he’s come here and that’s not including counting him in with crowds, but it’s hard to know when to push it. It’s worth it to make the point later tonight, when it won’t push the passive static in the air high enough to start worrying about shocking someone through the water.

For now you knock a horn against his in a little gesture of affection, and he knocks yours back and heads down the bank as Meulin jogs through shin-deep water to show you something in her hands.


	6. Chapter 6

vi. _A structure that thrives on telling you that you don’t understand, that we will never understand, that we weren’t built to understand_

Meulin is

Hm.

Meulin is dissecting a nut creature with more respect than you’ve ever seen any other troll have for life, particularly one that’s already over. She’s making a new leather punch for which she’ll need a bone from its scamper pole, but first she’s learning it, memorizing _this_ nut creature’s tendons and skeleton and insides as though it’s a unique and beautiful thing apart from the hundreds, maybe thousands she’s seen before.

(For most Alternian trolls, even wrigglers might learn to hunt. For Meulin, they need to.)

Later, she’ll draw it. Right now, Meulin is wiping her hands on a cloth in her lap, then taking her sketchbook from your (clean) hands again and making large, swooping notes, lines that sometimes make sense to you and sometimes don’t, because between the animal in three-dimensional space and the surface she has to render it in two she’s seeing something you aren’t. There are notes in her shorthand in corners, too, and in arrows pointed to joints and negative spaces, where the Disciple documents the thing in all its interlocking, pusher-just-beating parts

While the Signless tries to paint a sketch of her.

(“Painting a sketch,” you think immediately, is a wording she’d tease you for; that doesn’t make any art sense- no, you’re amending that. You’d tease you for it. She’d tell you you’re worrying too much and not everything is semantics, but yeah, sketching with paint just to paint over it would be a little bit dumb. It was romantic, though. Very sweet.)

She doesn’t always get to do this. When you were on your own, your trollmom did just fine, but Meulin has become a lot of how you subsist—both your family and the movement.

So this nut creature, sure, is going to become a fur, and three extra leather punches, and meat, just like every other nut creature before it, and sometimes she’s even done something with the skull—most of it to sell; she’ll or your trollmom will find a place in a market or on a well-trafficked sidewalk to spread them all out with a snuggleplane between the utilitarianized bits of its body and the ground. But tonight she has the time to stop, and dissect, and give it more study. Every time, she finds some way to pay her respects. Usually, a piece of the prey gets set aside and later, when it’s sanitary, consumed uncooked. Always, some small piece gets returned to the earth.

“But it all does eventually, anyway.”

But she’d love, you know, to do this every time. Meulin’s life is a study in nature like yours is in people, if the beginnings of your relationship with them hadn’t been distinctly opposite.

She grew up surrounded by trees, by lizards and squeakbeasts she learned to bat at and play with and trap with her lusus still there to take the trophies to; learning to jab her claws out for fish in a running stream and actually catch something even though her lusus didn’t understand, when teaching, that the scales would wedge under poor Meulin’s wriggler skin the first few times. Learning to curl up to keep warm in her very wild un-drone-built cave through dark-season storms and to play hide-and-seek up in trees and keep very, very quiet when three miles away her lusus is being dragged from land all the way to the shore and she didn’t hear it, for all her tracking skills that’s the only way to know, when you’re upwind from the smell of salt, until the hide-and-seek game’s gone on too long and she can’t seem to find you and you climb down and see the marks of your catmom’s hard-fought struggle yourself.

She keeps the things she loves close to her, now. Where she can keep track of them. Even before you knew about her bad auricular clot, you started to learn and keep yourself where she always kept you on her left side.

She’s a study in life, you think.

The way you are in politics, or blood, or you, or connections, or isolation, or disjointed pieces of it.

What Meulin gets is all of these things at once.

What she brings is a love not for crowds, but for people, when she hangs in the fringes, studying them. She brings that love in that same style even as she started to join you you further in and spiral closer to crowds’ centers, learned all the motions of comfort and public speaking in the small, person-to-person ways. She knows how to make a troll feel heard and how to be the second front-and-center head of the revolution, but Meulin loves people in the fact of their existence, in learning and observing them, in being able to bounce ideas about them back at you and decode a thousand mysterious things in posture and gait and body language and help the same people from the margins where no one needs to see her. Like how you’re a writer, and she’s an editor. You didn’t know jack about this, but if you were published, and she was lowerblooded than you, her name wouldn’t have to be on the book, apparently.

You know how to bandage a leg but she knows how to bandage it and dissect it. And both on a meowbeast as well as on a troll, you’ve seen her crack one’s bone to mend it and just two minutes later have it soothed and purring, you’ve seen her put one down and she’s willing to eat their meat as much as any other. (It’s hard for her. Usually, she eats one piece, for that same respect for the beast, “so it won’t go unused,” and you remind her that it’s okay not to use the rest. There’s rarely shortage. You try to make sure there’s never a need.)

She knew death to be a part of the life cycle. You thought this to be fundamentally wrong. You didn’t cry over your dinners, but you didn’t adore the fact, either.

She’s a study in life and a votary of it, too. You’re convinced.

Where you understand the pieces that are compatibly revolutionary and wriggler Kankri flung the rest away, Meulin starts to fill in the blanks. You’ll never understand death.

You never believed that death could have meaning. You still can’t, with trolls—she seems to mostly agree with that, where it comes to sacrifices or death in hard labor, cullings, military. Sacrifices, all of them. Sacrifices mean something. That’s why death can’t.

What you’d never reconciled was how everything can die anyway. How life can be about people living and no good will ever come of death and you are _convinced_ of this, you have to be, no martyrs, and still somehow, someday, even in old age when the world is at peace, she is still going to die. It’s where everything is going, and it’s one of the biggest mysteries in your life, and you might have railed against every single death as not yet, too soon, not life enough if

At least to her, it makes sense.

Still, you wouldn’t have thought to respect a nut creature’s death.

She wraps it up in a carrying cloth, you draw the sketchbook off her lap to keep it clean. The bones are laid out in another, also gently and meticulously rolled up. You half-sign to ask if she’d like you to take a pouch, and she’s already handing one to you, the one with the meat, so you take it with the utmost respect for any unliving thing you’ve held in your hands and stand, while she lays its acid tract and wasteshuttle tubes into the ground.

You can’t identify the part that gets consumed raw here, but it’s sanitary for her to do it now, with you holding the meat. You wait, time passes, and she stands.

“Time for us to go, love?” She watches the earth where the entrails lay, tests them with her shoe to see if they’ll be secure long enough to integrate with it. You offer her your right hand.

“Mm-hm.” She takes yours the moment she notices it’s there, which is always just quick enough to surprise you, and you turn and kiss her cheek.

She kisses the shell of your ear as her revenge and you’d strike back further if you didn’t both still have a very important job to be doing, so instead you turn back toward home where the bones will be sun-bleached and the meat cured.

“...So what was that... line, you were drawing, between the paw and the, um. The flank?”

Her step bounces once, the bones still somehow completely undisturbed in their pouch in her hand even as her hair goes flying. “Range of meowtion! He had a little inj-purr-y maybe two sweeps back, the tendon repaired itself funny.”

Your eyebrows raise. “That’s a long time for an injured nut creature to keep on scampering with a limp, isn’t it?”

_“Very._” _Yes._ It always feels like winning some kind of award when you ask something that gets her to light up like that.

She loves the nut creature while it was alive and she loves the bag of bones in her hand. The former gets the kind of remembrance a great acrobat might earn if they find a rare place in Church history on the way home, Meulin successfully not bounding off the planet because you keep your fingers twined.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been trying to figure out how to handle the notes for this chapter without making it sound like I don't think that writing fiction can be relevant to reality, or like I didn't write anything that matters to me here, and honestly, the simplest way to say it is that there's a point in this chapter at which Signless is grappling with whether it might be okay to be a cop if you're a good apple, and that's because of the point in history he is at, and how little the question has been asked on Alternia, and I am not suggesting it's a question that humans haven't answered.
> 
> Enjoy the chapter!

vii. _his voice grew incoherent._

“I had a conversation a half a season ago, with a well-intentioned legislacerator. He asked me what he could do to further the cause, and I asked what he wanted to do, and he said apply the law more fairly. He wanted justice.”

You’re inside a run-down barn outside a city that no longer uses them. People sit on barrels and longgrass bales, a few psionics and/or their quadrantmates up in the rafters either for a better view or to make space. It’s needed.

“I answered—’I don’t think justice comes from death,’ because it’s the only answer I had. It was a true one. I don’t. Every single troll behind every single bloodpusher that stops pushing is a kind person cut short before they got there; an aborted capacity to change. It’s a belief that a troll can become enough a detriment to society that we are better off without them now than we will be with them, healed, and saying that is not asking forgiveness—it’s asking understanding. It’s asking that we accept the difficult truth behind the fact that I do not need to understand you to know you are a troll with value. It’s knowing that my life is worth something because I am a troll, and your life is worth something because you are a troll, and that if every person who hurt one or a thousand of us was killed in penance then my mother would have been dead before I was hatched and I don’t know if the fact that we’re here now makes things right. I just know that it makes the two of us alive. I just know that she’s helping more than she was hurting, and that if someone had gone vigilante and killed every single jade matron who’d killed more than a dozen of us for defects before we left the caverns then the next generation would have been trained and installed in their place, and I don’t know if another would have saved another kid like me, but I know that change would have been a long time coming.

“I know that tolerating violence, genocide, or slavery isn’t a price to pay. It isn’t one I’m fucking interested in; the night I preach _tolerance_ for genocidal acts is the night I’ve been impersonated and the movement infiltrated and it’s time to move on, and trust your own inner voices better than whatever bullshit you’d hear me spewing. I just know that killing the people who’ve done it doesn’t heal us.

“It doesn’t heal anything in us to consider each other disposable.”

This one took tossing around a thousand times to write. Even now, you remember the phantom sensation of your grabmit stubs pressed to the bridge of your nose while the Ψiioniic explains what makes it sound right and what makes him feel wrong, or the Disciple gently suggests you shoosh your tits.

“Not because it— makes you worse. Not because it makes you ‘like them.’ But for fuck’s sake, because understanding that you never deserved to be hurt—and you didn’t, Allmother below, you didn’t, you never did—means understanding that you can _never earn_ being written off. It’s not that you’re ‘good enough.’ Though you are. It’s not that you’re kind enough, or different enough, or above a line, it’s that you are a troll, and there is nothing you could do to deserve to hurt. That if you have done harm, there is no amount of harm you could do to yourself that will help a single troll it’s wounded, and so instead look forward, take a deep breath, do better.

“If you’re good because you are a troll, then nothing has power over you. Not power that lasts. Not power that is divinely intended, that is right, that maintains itself once they can’t hit us hard enough to keep us down anymore. If you are good because you are a troll, you need to prove nothing else.

“That’s why I can’t believe justice comes from death. Because they are a troll. And that—that fucking has to mean something, that’s all we have.”

It’s okay to take a pause. The message needs its chance to sink in, anyway. Your chest has gotten tight.

In all your sweeps of speaking, of finally venturing into a world you had to learn to be terrified of and, once there, learn unabashed loud love for all over again, you’ve relearned how to cry in front of it in every way but one: To preserve your life, even when you know better and you know you’ve started wearing the color on your hood, the mutation-damning tears won’t come.

That helps you, right now. You feared it would make you look like you’re feeling less than you are, but you’ve been told it never does. It allows you to do things like this, and still keep speaking.

“Death can’t be a shortcut. We can’t let it. The idea of death as a solution to our problems is a manifestation of this weaponized, societally-intended fear of each other, fear of noncompliance, and in the end fear of all the sticky parts of understanding that the person next to you is as full a troll as you are and that is out of your control.

“That’s okay. That’s— it’s fucking brilliant. I firmly believe that our biggest strength is that we are always going to be learning from each other and always going to be misunderstanding. I remember, Before, the biggest thing that feels different there is that we could step on each others’ frondnubs all the fucking time, or we would get annoyed and spit unkind shit in someone else’s face, and we stick around long enough to heal it because we lived to see tomorrow. That’s how you begin to _know_ people. That’s how peace _works_.

“It’s safe enough for me to fuck up—even permanently, not everyone on the planet kept me around, I’ve lost friends on both runs through the universe—because it’s safe for me to be imperfect. It’s possible for you and I to be friends before I understand you because there is an assumption that we will learn. It’s possible to keep living under any fucking thing, to keep going in a place that wants to hurt or kill you, because we say no, we reject that, we will band together with each other in all our greatest traits and flaws and we will find another way.

“He asked ‘What can I do from here,’ and so I—” You sit down against the cloth-covered stack of splintered pallets on which you’ve set yourself, still able to see over your audience but closer to them now. The Disciple stays standing, her hands pausing when your words did. “—I said ‘I don’t know.’”

“I said it in part because I don’t know if legislaceration exists in a way that’s fair. I think you can prevent deaths while you’re there, mislay trails, argue for lessened violence. You can be a voice for kindness to plead to colleagues that your lower-blooded friends can’t reach, but ultimately, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to stay there without continuing to get blood on your hands or if the only answer is to step away. I don’t know for certain if people will be safer or worse off if you do.

“I said it because I _didn’t_ know what _he, specifically_ could do, and so let me be clear, the conversation didn’t stop there. We spoke about permissions and privileges he had. How much he could get away with before his supervising officers caught up with him, how to have an exit strategy before then. How it matters monumentally to unlock a cell that was locked a moment ago, but more to keep the security team distracted, but more to give them enough food for half a night and a safehive to go to. I couldn’t tell him ours, not while the uniform stays on. ‘I don’t know’ does not mean ‘let’s not find _out.’_

“I said it mostly because I do not know how to fix this thing without you. I can’t. One troll can’t. We’ve seen the damage that tasking us with one voice to fix Alternia has done and I don’t have a gander bulb toward fixing it by installing a different Empress. I said it because I know what better looks like, but I have no fucking clue what perfect is. Even in the Alternia Before, even when life was not defined by killing each other or shoving each other down or the trafficking, sale, and subjugation of as many people as you can, we were always working toward something. People were discontented there, Before; we weren’t done.

“I had a vision yesterday.”

You close your eyes, resting your palms facing up on your knees. The image can never come back to you in as full pieces as you had it in before you woke up, as in the seconds right after, but that’s why you take such pains to write it down. That’s why most of this is scripted.

Still, allowing a moment to dip back into the scene helps. Sometimes you need to try to remember. You thought it was theatrical, which is opposite your intent, but the Disciple says it moves through you like watching someone breathe out smoke and make pictures.

“Five kids gathered on a hivestem roof, a little dangerously close to daylight, but no one yet wanting to admit defeat and take the gathering inside.

“Maybe it was because something felt rebellious just about _being_ there, you know? A wriggler doesn’t stop wanting to be free and be a wrigger and fuck whatever rules are around them even if the rules are a thousand times looser.” The soft laugh you give here is unplanned, it’s just occurred to you to add: “I’m proof of that.” Back into the script: “He’s proof of that.

“But definitely in part because it felt like a conversation one just couldn’t have inside something as banal as a hivestem. The yellowblooded boy, with his hair always grown out to approximately the length of a janitorial mop, had to live here every fucking day, and this was something too special to take somewhere ordinary. It’s not like the walls had auricular sponges. It’s just that you’re five sweeps old and this can be special if you choose to make it.

“The story of the night was runaways. Our friend the heiress, run off to be anything else but a leader. The only other public mutant I knew—this chubby-cheeked boy with a light in his eyes and beautiful, armspan-wide wings, thin as a buzzbeetle’s and strong enough to carry him—regaling us with adventurous notions of leaving ‘the machine’ to rebuild whatever fantastical hidden forest-communities he could conjure up and do society all over again.

“She,” you nod toward Trollmom, who gives a soft smirk and obliging little wave. The Ψiioniic doesn’t even like his wriggler name, let alone having his image tied to embarrassing stories spread to the public, but Trollmom very much likes her cameos, “had hopped up onto the low wall at the building’s very edge, and begun to expound upon how she was never going to be a matron.

“And it occurred to me, when I woke up, that I spend every single second in the Alternia Before the safest I have ever felt. I spend every single second there able to breathe without question, to speak without caring in a way that I’m still teaching myself to.” Another soft laugh, this one planned. “I was an unstoppable little shit. No, that doesn’t matter, what matters is I remember that I spent every second there _hungry._

“Never in the way that comes from missing food on your stomach. This is in the way that I stay awake for, in the way that spirals itself up into your chest until you _need_ to speak or write or fight or scream until something gives, someone understands, it is _out._ Here’s the thing: We were wrigglers, and we were not very wise wrigglers, and when any one of us got a little too earnest, the others laughed it off. The little Signless over there did not understand the concept of a runaway matron for a second. Rebuilding society all over again, that _he_ understood, but here _I_ am, a universe later, staring at this— this mirror of me, and going what the hell, why?

“And that’s just it. I don’t need to understand. The most beautiful place I have ever existed is one that he swore to sink every tool he had into and fix, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know how it would have looked in the end, but I know that we were not going to stop climbing.

“I know that peace, in all of its room for us to misunderstand and fumble but _listen_, to cross lines and stick frondpads in talkblasters but _speak_, was going to get us there. I know it is going to get us there. I know because there is something you need that someone else on this planet also needs desperately, and that there is something you understand that I don’t, and _that’s_ what it is. That’s what we are. Inventing ourselves and discovering each other, and we don’t get to see an inch of that, we don’t appreciate its smallest sliver, if kindness doesn’t come first.

“I know you are worthy because you are a troll. I know I deserve to be here, deserve to live well, deserve to be happy, all of the same things as every one of you, because I am a troll. I know that it is difficult, that it should not be a question, that we deserve more than to work for what we already deserve, but I promise, I promise, I _promise_ kindness is how we build it.

“I promise everything fucking begins when we recognize our potential, our longing to learn each other in kindness. I promise you everything fucking begins when we care.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I FIXED THE WEIRD EDITING NOTE TO SELF IN CHAPTER TWO. I'm so sorry. Thank you.

viii. _Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._

All it’s ever been is bought time, stolen time, borrowed time.

It’s been how many more lives and freedoms you can help steal back in twelve stolen sweeps.

You are cognizant of the fact that the Empire stole them away from you first, that it never owned them, that this was defense, that you are right, but if you stick on the “there was more time to be had and I lost it” train too long your pan slips and you are going to scream. Every night was a victory. Every night was something someone had won for you, usually someone else, and you’ve been using them very well and if you play this right there’s still a chance.

_(“As long as a pusher keeps on pushing there’s a chance. As long as there’s life there is the capacity for change.”)_

_(“I’ve never believed in ‘it could be worse.’’’)_

You’re in an imperial holding cell awaiting, presumably, your trial and execution. This isn’t cynicism. This is the same way you would say that if you bleed in public, you are going to be culled—it’s true, until you change it.

The cement you’re sitting on is cold, and moving the pads of your grabmitt stubs against it to center yourself, you almost immediately find blood. It can’t be a full night old. You try to swipe it off against a cleaner patch of the floor and find more blood, instead, probably the source of the one drop, and you finally bite the bullet to instead wipe it on your leggings (they’ve taken the cloak). You still feel it there, when you’re done. You can handle a living troll’s blood on you just fine, when you’re stitching up skin or bandaging up a wound, you can handle it at least long enough to stay there, and finish working, and gulp for air about it later that night. This, though.

You find something else to think about while you can still breathe. The trial. (Gingerly, between two claws, you peel the fabric away from your skin and hold it up in a little peak.)

This cell is the third you’ve been shuffled into, not counting the scuttlewagons and boats as transport in-betweeen. Not once since you’ve gotten here have you seen the rest of your family, and you rarely see another troll. When you do, it’s always in a pair. You think that’s because the Empire and the departments responsible for organizing your capture are afraid of your, and-you-quote (from the one guard who would speak to you), “silver tongue.”

It’s effective. Every time, even if you do manage to speak, it doesn’t go further. And you’ve talked your way out of capture before, even when the people who help you are afraid—

But you’ve just never been captured like this. Centralized imperial military, coordinated on all sides, not local law enforcement waiting for backup and transport or independent groups cashing in on a bounty. Your imprisonment is coordinated with the full richness of resources the Empress herself is willing to spend on you to draw from, and she has spent plenty very freely. You’re aware that you wouldn’t be paired with _these_ guards, out of the thousands on Alternia, if they weren’t very effectively afraid of each other.

_(“Remember that you have a choice,” you tell them, every time. And then: “Remember that the one you make with me doesn’t have to be the one you make tomorrow.”)_

A trial, though, is catastrophically different from a single pair of guards.

A trial can expect thousands in attendance. You know that your sentence is already decided and that no recorded lowblood has successfully plead their case here before, not in the capitol, not for charges of treason. You know that you can expect to speak to His Honorable Tyranny, but if Her Imperious Condescension is in attendance—and not to call yourself special, every rebel who has ever lived has deserved the same audience, but you sincerely hope she will be—it’s her mind you have to change. You know more about her than about him, but should be preparing to appeal to both.

What you don’t want to do is spark violence to save your life. You’ll need to address the crowd, you’ll need to do something that is meaningful and matters and for the sake of impressions, for clarity of meaning and to visibly stand by the truth that every one of them, as a troll, is more important than any position of power—it needs to be clear that they matter to you as much as the Empress or His Honorable Tyranny does. That’s critical. The amount of time you spend speaking to each is a message in itself and you are painfully aware of this as you consider how to spend your painfully little time.

This isn’t a case where you get to say “tell me a little more about you, first.” You don’t like assumptions, but at least beyond the broadest of strokes, you won’t be making any, and you can’t bring yourself to find fault in remembering and rebuilding the arguments that work.

You know, for example, that so much of highblooded Alternian identity is tied to power. You know how to dismantle the concept of power as a thing that anyone _needs_, and how to be gentle, how to facilitate someone to the understanding that an attack on power isn’t an attack on you. The theory doesn’t have to be perfect, the revolution doesn’t have to be won tonight; you only have to say things that are philosophically sound, that leave Alternia with enough if you leave it, that leave it unwounded, and that buy you time.

You only need to say things that guide them enough and leave it unwounded. Remind them the tools they have, remind them that those don’t belong solely to you. Leave the planet that knows, that is waiting so achingly, that is standing on the edge of a precipice and if it only makes the leap _will_ heal, just ready, enabled to do what they already can.

Everything comes back to that.

As for the appeal for your life, the chance to buy time, the work you can keep doing now if only someone hears you, you can build the rest.

And so you know what you’re going to say, mostly, when another guard you haven’t met enters to yank you to your stumbling feet. You know your opening lines as a second trades the shackles around your wrist for a far more visually pathetic rope. One steps in front of you, one steps behind, and you spend the short, but clumsy walk down the hall in two places at once.

“Please remember that tonight you have a choice. Tell me what you’re up against and I will problem-solve with you. Tell me what comes down on our heads if we choose another way this ends.” The trial begins with the detailing of your charges, and you may not speak during them. You know how you’re going to open. You know that it matters that once you start speaking, you do not stop.

You know that treason is defined, colloquially, as action against the Empire, and that the Empire is only the constructed amalgamation of people and the invisible walls we confine ourselves to under that name; there’s the half that means _us_, and the half made of nothing at all. Everything you have ever done has been in love for all of us. That’s why it isn’t treason. That’s why allowing the Empire to collapse inward on itself, to keep crushing the people it always has and to watch quietly until one night you quietly waste away, is the worse crime; that’s your way in.

There has been silence for seven stumbled steps, and twelve, thirteen seconds.

Fourteen, fifteen. “I want to understand.” At first you wonder if the rustling behind you might be a shifting in posture that you can’t see, if you had learned enough that facing them you would recognize anger, or recognition, or the sensation of being suddenly disarmed. The slimmer end of a club rams into your spine head-on and it would’ve taken more than you have not to scream. That’s okay. They get to see you hurt. They get to see that this is real.

You’re jerked forward by the rope before you can be sure you’re still upright, but somehow you are, and you remember composure. _It’s okay, sweetgrub._ Gander bulb lids closing, enough of a breath to pull yourself near upright, a little more of a healthily dark shade, you think, to your face. “It’s okay,” you say, before the doors open. “It’s okay if this hurts later. Remember that you’re going to keep making choices. Remember that the one you make with me doesn’t have to be the one you make tomorrow.”

That your words garner no outward acknowledgment at all isn’t the end of them. The troll leading you methodically turns a complicated lock, six consecutive motions, and then the doors open.

There isn’t a trial. There is a jut.

There’s Meulin and that means she hasn’t recanted and your horrible, die-for-each-other-but-live-for-the-movement-first heart (diamond, club, spade, the light and fluttery thing that moves around inside you, the space between the tendons and the muscles bone and blood) is _relieved_, of all things, because it means she didn’t recant, it wasn’t horrible enough for her to recant. You should feel guilt about that. You’re both going to die.

It means she still thinks recanting would be worse.

You are in love in a way you don’t think any iteration of you, in a thousand universes, could understand.

If you stay here and in love and don’t think about anything else the Empire can’t pull the proverbial fucking rug out from under you, but then somewhere out there across the dirt, closer to the Empress than to her, the Ψiioniic retches.

The last time you said “I love you” to him was the night before your capture. You can live with that. To Meulin, the Disciple, it was— Rift’s Carbuncle below, it was shouted as you were being pulled apart.

With your eyes, you find him. Of course, you find him, Meulin nodding sadly in his direction to guide you to him— sick, and dosed on suppressants and sedatives and some cocktail of things that’ve made him barely here but the Empress— _manicured claws on his skull_— takes his head and grips it like a plush in a mechanical prod-and-grab machine, and forces it down toward you. You debate smiling. You won’t risk the interpretation that it’s about him.

You search, frantic, for your mother—the last time you said it to her was the night before, too, and it’s been... three? Four nights since? Your vague, slightly concussed notion of the passage of time is not to be trusted, but you’re guessing by the emptiness of your acid tract.

It’s right when your eyes land on her that the rope around your wrists is yanked forward and you walk after it. Your eyes stay locked on her form as you remind the troll lifting the heated irons from the fire with heavy tongs, and the one closing your hands into fists and gripping them roughly, at arm’s length in front of you, that they have a choice.

(“I only asked you to try. I only asked you to try. _I only asked you to fucking try.”)_

If it’s up to you, this is where the history books let your part of the story end.


End file.
